You thought the "Muslim problem'' was gone. But, baby, it has staying power.
I knew it as soon as I flipped my cell phone open a few days ago.
"Did you know that Obama's Muslim?'' my grandmother asked, incredulously.
"He's not,'' I said. "That's a rumor.''

"I don't know,'' my grandmother replied. "That's what Sheila told me at lunch. She said: how can you vote for such a man? Someone who's Muslim?''
My grandmother told Sheila that he seemed like a nice young fellow, who would provide a change from Bush.
Sheila was in a snit. She was supporting Hillary.

I decided to give my grandmother some ammunition: The media mogul David Geffen, I said, is a big Jewish philanthropist (my grandmother recognized the name immediately) and he's supporting Obama! And he's business partners with the great - sainted, practically - Steven Spielberg!

My grandmother was floored. Well, she said, I'll definitely tell Sheila that!
It was more religious pandering than I wanted to do, but I had to convince my grandmother and her Jewish coterie that voting for Obama was not a vote against their own interests, that Jewish-Americans shouldn't be afraid of the senator's childhood in Indonesia or his Middle Eastern middle name. Of course, they shouldn't be afraid of a candidate who really is Muslim, but that's a different story.

But hesitancy about Obama - and concern about his divided allegiances - may create a tremendous problem for the senator's candidacy.

Already, he is perceived as overly exotic. There's the odd name, the time spent overseas, the Kenyan heritage, the father who had eight children by four women, and the picture of Barack wearing Somali garb. There have been rumors not just about his religion but about his willingness to recite the pledge of allegiance and put his hand over his heart during the national anthem. And Obama himself has publicly rejected the notion of wearing a flag lapel pin.

This may all seem explainable, easily dismissed, simply diversionary. Until you consider that a Bush adviser told The New York Times in April of 2004 that John Kerry "looks French,'' though Mr. Kerry - who merely had a cousin in France - was no more French than Mr. Bush. But this vague accusation of foreignness stuck, seeming to highlight the president's folksiness, his Texas twang, his apple-pie Americanness.
And, this time around, the Clinton and McCain camps will do whatever they can to transform Obama's exoticism into foreignness.

In fact, Hillary has already had some success with this tack. She continually emphasizes Obama's inability to sympathize with regular, blue-collar Americans. Lofty speeches, she says, aren't exactly the same as getting your hands dirty or sitting around the kitchen table making tough financial decisions.

And in state after state, Hillary has been picking up the votes of high-school educated, low-income voters - voters who question Obama's ability to connect to ordinary people, who have heard the Muslim rumors and the anti-America vitriol from Jeremiah Wright, who have watched Michelle Obama stride on stage in modernist outfits and Jimmy Choo heels (about $600 a pair), who have heard her famous Milwaukee gaffe: "for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country.''

Now, Bill Clinton - the Rovian figure of 2008 - has seen the potential of the he's-not-as-American-as-you-and-me strategy. "I think it would be a great thing,'' the former President said of a McCain-Clinton match-up last week, "if we had an election year where you had two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interest of this country.''

Suggesting that the 2008 election might be anything BUT a contest between patriots seems like dirty pool.

And, in recent days, Clinton aides have begun to argue that Obama is exhibiting some decidedly un-American, totalitarian tendencies, trying to "disenfranchise'' voters in Michigan and Florida. This is both baseless - Obama can't tell Michigan and Florida what to do - and hypocritical. The Clinton and Obama campaigns agreed on a set of rules before embarking on this campaign, and now one camp wants to re-jigger the rulebook about three-quarters of the way through the game.

A friend told me this week that he didn't think Hillary would get reelected to the Senate if she continued to twist and distort the process. But Hillary, who's always about six chess moves ahead of everyone else, may already believe this to be her final scene. Which is why she's locked in an operatic death match with Barack Hussein Obama.

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